Tasmanian Literary Prize Shunned by Its Originator

By RAYMOND BONNER

Published: April 22, 2003

HOBART, Tasmania—
Richard Flanagan had a notion of how to improve his island state's infamous reputation as the gulag of the British empire and a site for the slaughter of Aborigines by Europeans. Mr. Flanagan, a novelist, proposed a literary prize for fiction. The governor agreed, and the biennial Tasmania Pacific Region Prize, for an author from Australia, New Zealand or Melanesia, was born.

It is the richest literary prize in the Southern Hemisphere, about $25,000 ($40,000 Australian), a decent sum for a novelist in a country of only 19 million people where selling 20,000 copies of a book makes it a runaway best seller.

But Mr. Flanagan has begun a boycott of the prize he invented. The problem? A co-sponsor of the prize is the state's Forestry Commission.

While the Tasmanian government says the commission promotes sustainable use of timber, Mr. Flanagan and the island's environmentalists say it promotes the cutting of old-growth forests.

Tasmania has the tallest hardwood forests in the world. (California redwoods are softwood.) ''They're being chain-sawed and turned into toilet paper,'' Mr. Flanagan said during a ritual Australian Friday afternoon: beer at the pub with the crowd spilling outdoors.

In a black sweater and jeans, he seemed far more comfortable than he felt a month ago when he had an audience with Queen Elizabeth II, after he won the Commonwealth Prize for ''Gould's Book of Fish,'' a phantasmagoric tale about life in Tasmania's penal colony, with each of 12 chapters written in a different color ink and illustrated by a drawing of a fish.

''They were trying to launder their image with writers and artists,'' he said about the Forestry Commission after withdrawing his novel from contention for the prize.

Mr. Flanagan, a descendant of Irish convicts, said he intended to withdraw quietly. But when his friend Tim Winton heard, Mr. Winton, also an acclaimed novelist, followed suit. He withdrew his novel ''Dirt Music,'' which evokes the vastness of space and describes the life of the edge-of-society characters in Western Australia.

That seemed to be the end of it, but then, after the short list was announced, Peter Carey, who was odds-on favorite for ''True History of the Kelly Gang,'' announced that he, too, was withdrawing. Mr. Carey, who lives in New York, is one of Australia's best-known writers. His books include ''Oscar and Lucinda'' and ''Jack Maggs.''

Finally Joan London withdrew after she was short-listed for ''Gilgamesh,'' a moving account of a woman who was born on a tiny farm in remote Western Australia and who meets the modern world through a cousin who had worked on an archaeological dig in Iraq.

Mr. Flanagan said that Ms. London, the least known, had made the biggest sacrifice because the prize would have meant recognition for her. But he would not criticize authors who did not withdraw. They included Kate Jennings, an Australian, for her book ''Moral Hazard,'' about moral vacuity on Wall Street and the difficulty of dealing with Alzheimer's.

In the end the diminished prize was awarded to a New Zealand author, Lloyd Jones, for ''The Book of Fame,'' a semifictional account of the 1905 tour of Europe by the All Black rugby team from New Zealand. Mr. Jones said he also had considered pulling out. ''It is vile to chip natural forests,'' he said.

As for winning, it was welcome, he said. ''But it's a bit like reaching the finals of the 100 meters in the Olympics and finding someone has sprained their ankle, someone has the flu, and someone falls over on the way to the race.''